Teddy Bear Airplane Cake

Today’s cake video tutorial, which features a teddy bear flying an airplane, is SO cute and fun for young birthdays as well as baby showers! We hope that you enjoy it!

I’ll show you how to create the airplane from fondant using a simple template, as well as the teddy bear, flags, clouds, and other fun details. We hope that you enjoy the video!

Materials

For this cake, we used a 6 inch double barrel cake. This is 4 six inch cake layers with a cake cardboard halfway up, and 5 bubble tea straw supports beneath. The design would be great for cakes of any size. We frosted the cake in our classic vanilla buttercream frosting.

Fondant with Tylose Powder Kneaded into it (or gum paste) for the plane- If adding tylose powder to fondant, just add until the fondant seems to change consistency a bit. It will dry more quickly and firmer.

Fondant for the flags

Template

Gum Paste (or fondant with tylose powder kneaded into it) if making a number cake topper

Piping tips: Tip 3 for the piped white line around the cake, Tip 10 or 12 for Clouds and cutting out polka dots for cake topper

Coloring gels: I used Wilton Leaf Green, Americolor Lemon Yellow, Super Red (I actually used pre-tinted Red Satin Ice Fondant)

Additional Notes

Dry Time: Our airplane dried for about an hour or two before we applied it to the cake. That was plenty of time since it was supported almost entirely in back by the cake. We used pre-colored Red Satin Ice fondant with tylose powder kneaded into it. Tylose powder is optional but it sets up more quickly.

Fondant Thickness: I rolled the red fondant to about ⅛ inch thickness before cutting it out with the template and allowing to dry on parchment paper.

Tylose Glue I often use “tylose glue” as my edible adhesive when working when attaching fondant or gum paste pieces together. It is just a mixture of tylose powder with a small amount of warm water. If you don’t have tylose powder, you can also use piping gel as glue or even just lightly dampening fondant will make it tacky enough to bond.

Just Fyi– If your plane was a cake topper instead (and wouldn’t have the support of the cake behind it) you would need to dry make it a couple of days in advance to be on the safe side, and you would want to use gum paste or or knead enough tylose powder into the fondant to feel a change in consistency so that the fondant takes on the properties of gum paste (dries more quickly and much firmer)

We used a teddy bear, but all sorts of animals would be cute driving the plane ;0) Or you could even make a simple little boy or girl’s face.

For my number “1” cake topper: I had this on hand already. I like to make number toppers with either gum paste or if using fondant, it needs to have a good amount kneaded into it so that it is strong. Since the “1” that I had on hand was white, but I needed red for today’s cake, I just applied a thin layer of red fondant on top of it. If you do a lot of number toppers, keep this tip in mind ;0) – It’s nice to have a stockpile of commonly used numbers dried and ready.